His name is William Binney, a 32-year veteran of the secretive
agency, and one of the best codebreakers in NSA history — who
appeared in an
Aug. 2012 video shot by Laura Poitras for The New York Times.

Binney detailed a top-secret surveillance
program called "Stellar Wind" — the scope of which
had never been public — which tracked electronic activities,
including phone calls, emails, banking, travel records, and
social media, and then mapped them to collect "all the attributes
that any individual has" in every type of activity and build a
profile based on the data.

"So that now I can pull your entire life together from all those
domains and map it out and show your entire life over time,"
Binney said in the interview.

From The Times:

“The decision must have been made in September 2001,” Mr. Binney
told me and the cinematographer Kirsten Johnson. “That’s when the
equipment started coming in.” In this Op-Doc, Mr. Binney explains
how the program he created for foreign intelligence gathering was
turned inward on this country. He resigned over this in 2001 and
began speaking
out publicly in the last year.

Another whistleblower named Thomas Tamm — an official
with the Justice Department — also came forward after
uncovering the Bush administration's secret
authorizations to intercept emails and phone calls inside the
U.S. without warrants.

The unit had special rules that appeared to be hiding the
NSA activities from a panel of federal judges who are required to
approve such surveillance. When Tamm started asking questions,
his supervisors told him to drop the subject. He says one
volunteered that "the program" (as it was commonly called within
the office) was "probably illegal."

In his interview in a Hong Kong hotel room, Edward Snowden
told The Guardian the "intelligence community in general is focused on getting
intelligence wherever it can by any means possible."

With programs like Stellar Wind, and this week's uncovering of
PRISM — he may be right.